Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough eBook

“Most o’ the chaps round here has gone,”
he said, “an’ I don’t like staying
be’ind. Seems as though you were hanging
back like. ’Taint that I shouldn’t
like to go; but it’s this way ... (Hullo, I got
my hand on a wasp that time) ... There’s
such a lot o’ women-folk dependent on me.
There’s my wife and there’s my mother
down the village and my aunt; and not a man
to do anything for ’em but me. After my
work on th’ farm, I keeps all three gardens
going and a patch of allotment down the valley as well.”

“You’re growing a lot of good food, and
that’s military work,” I said.

He seemed cheered by the idea, and asked me if I’d
like to see the potatoes he had dug up that evening—­they
were “a wunnerful fine lot,” he said.

So after he had stripped the pear-tree he shouldered
the ladder, and we went down the village to David’s
garden. There I saw his potatoes, some lying
to dry where they had been dug up, others in sacks.
Also his marrows and beans and cabbages and lettuces.
A little apologetically, he offered me some of the
largest potatoes—­“just as a hobby,”
he said, meaning thereby that it was only a trifle
he offered.

As I went away in the gathering dark, with my hands
full of potatoes, I met the landlord of the Blue Boar,
his shirt sleeves rolled up as usual above his brown,
muscular arms.

“Bad news that about Mrs. Lummis,” he
said, looking towards the cottage on the other side
of the road.

“What is that?” said I. “Her
son?” There had been no news of him for two
months.

“Yes, poor Jack. She’s got news that
he was killed near la Bassee in June. Nice feller—­and
her only son.”

Then, more cheerfully, he added, “Jim’s
coming home to-morrow. Going to get his officer’s
rig out, you know, and have a rest—­the first
since he went out a year ago.”

“You’ll be glad to see him,” said
I.

“Not half,” said he with a vast smile.

ON RUMOUR

I was speaking the other day to a man of cautious
mind on a subject of current rumour. “Well,”
he said, “if I had been asked whether I believed
such evidence four months ago I should have said ‘Certainly.’
But after the great Russian myth I believe nothing
that I can’t prove. I believed in that
army of ghosts that came from Archangel! There
are people who say they didn’t believe in it.
Some of them believe they didn’t believe in it.
But I say defiantly that I did believe in it.
And I say further that there was never a rumour in
the world that seemed based upon more various or more
convincing evidence. And it wasn’t true....
Well, I find I’m a changed man. I find
I am no longer a believer: I am a doubter.”

This experience, I suppose, is not uncommon.
The man who believes as easily to-day as he did six
months ago is a man on whom lessons are thrown away.
We have lived in a world of gigantic whispers, and
most of them have been false whispers. Even the
magic word “Official” leaves one cold.
It is not what I am “officially” told
that interests me: it is what I am “officially”
not told that I want to know in order to arrive at
the truth.